“And I,” said the other; “and to-morrow
evening we’ll be in that cool green Paradise
of a glen. Think of it! Meantime I shall
grill through another evening in the House, and pair.”

CHAPTER VI

PASTORAL

I

A July morning had dawned over the Dreichill, and
the glen was filled with sunlight, though as yet there
seemed no sun. Behind a peak of hill it displayed
its chastened morning splendours, but a stray affluence
of brightness had sought the nooks of valley in all
the wide uplands, courier of the great lord of heat
and light and the brown summer. The house of
Etterick stands high in a crinkle of hill, with a background
of dark pines, and in front a lake, set in shores
of rock and heather. When the world grew bright
Lewis awoke, for that strange young man had a trick
of rising early, and as he rubbed sleep from his eyes
at the window he saw the exceeding goodliness of the
morning. He roused his companions with awful
threats, and then wandered along a corridor till he
came to a low verandah, whence a little pier ran into
a sheltered bay of the loch. This was his morning
bathing-place, and as he ran down the surface of rough
moorland stone he heard steps behind him, and George
plunged into the cold blue waters scarcely a second
after his host.

It was as chill as winter save for the brightness
of the morning, which made the loch in open spaces
a shining gold. As they raced each other to the
far end, now in the dark blue of shade, now in the
gold of the open, the hill breeze fanned their hair,
and the great woody smell of pines was sweet around
them. The house stood dark and silent, for the
side before them was the men’s quarters, and
at that season given up to themselves; but away beyond,
the smoke of chimneys curled into the still air.
A man was mowing in some field on the hillside, and
the cry of sheep came from the valley. By and
by they reached the shelving coast of fine hill gravel,
and as they turned to swim easily back a sleepy figure
staggered down the pier and stumbled rather than plunged
into the water.

But in a second a dark head appeared which shook itself
vigorously, and a figure made for the other two with
great strokes. He was by so much the best swimmer
of the three that he had soon reached them, and though
in all honesty he first swam to the farther shore,
yet he touched the pier very little behind them.
Then came a rush for the house, and in half an hour
three fresh-coloured young men came downstairs, whistling
for breakfast.